High School Students

A worker in Inglewood sprays an office with a semiautomatic handgun, killing two. A former employee rakes the Caltrans yard in Orange with an assault rifle, killing four. A man in pastoral upper Ojai guns down two neighbors, the latter in front of her shrieking 3-year-old. A rifle-wielding father in suburban Simi Valley chases his wife and three children, shooting all to death. A Huntington Beach man slaughters five.

A bill before the California Legislature to address soaring student loan debt would require high school students to take a personal finance class.  ALSO: Photo gallery: Ted Rall cartoons Stumbling into another Korean war Schwarzenegger: California's silent disaster Follow Ted Rall on Twitter @TedRall

Valley College opened its doors, robotics laboratory and broadcasting studios Tuesday and today to some 600 high school seniors from around the Valley during senior days, designed to display the school's facilities and acclimate teens to the college atmosphere.

A California lawmaker and undergraduates concerned about record student-loan debt are rallying at the Capitol today for measures to protect those attending universities from going too deeply into hock. Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont) is joining the students to seek support for a package of bills he has introduced. One bill, AB 233, would prevent wage garnishing on student loans not made or guaranteed by the government, while AB 534 would require universities to provide entrance and exit counseling to students regarding institutional or state-funded loans.

The nation's high school seniors are all but clueless when it comes to understanding essential truths about America's past, according to test results released Thursday. To many of them, the Boston Tea Party, the Civil War and World War II are dimly understood events from a foggy past. And that is particularly worrisome in a post-Sept. 11 climate as Americans are being forced to defend their values and country, educators said. A 2001 U.S.

The 80 students who study work experience under career counselor Barney Davis at Point Loma High School consider his classes a godsend. The once-a-week course enables them to satisfy the school district's graduation requirements that all students take a sixth course each semester, while freeing them all other days to go to their part-time jobs early.

Like many honor students with dreams of going to an Ivy League university, Burton Liao has been taking a test preparation course to boost his scores on college entrance exams. But unlike his classmates in the summer program, Liao has plenty of time left to learn SAT vocabulary words and score-boosting strategies before the big test day arrives. He's only 13 years old.

Laughing as they killed, two youths clad in dark ski masks and long black coats fired handguns at will and blithely tossed pipe bombs into a crowd of their terrified classmates Tuesday inside a suburban high school southwest of Denver, littering halls with as many as 23 bodies and wounding at least 25 others.

Before we eat Thanksgiving dinner at my house, along with saying grace, each of the 20 or so people at the table takes a turn lighting a candle and expressing gratitude. The appreciation can be lighthearted - for mashed potatoes or a day off from school. Or the thankfulness may be accompanied by a heavy heart - for the memories of a loved one recently passed. As it happens, this expression is not an empty exercise. And if we developed the discipline to be consciously grateful on a regular basis, year-round, research shows we'd be happier and suffer less depression and stress.

A 17-year-old Dorsey High School baseball player died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head while aboard the team bus as it returned from a game Tuesday, police said. Wilford Wright, the team's starting shortstop, was playing Russian roulette in the back of the bus when his .22-caliber pistol went off, said the team's coach, former Dodger outfielder Derrel Thomas. But Los Angeles Police Department investigators said the shooting could have been a suicide.

NEW YORK -- How much should employers pay the people who serve up your french fries and ring up your tacos? It's an issue that's being raised for the second time in six months as hundreds of fast food workers in New York City walked out on the job Thursday to demand higher wages. An estimated 400 workers from 60 restaurants in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Harlem participated, organizers say. The campaign, organized in part by the group Fast Food Forward, is asking for wages to be raised to $15 an hour, which in some cases would double the pay of some workers, raising their pay to around what a substitute teacher makes, or an emergency medical technician, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

People who volunteer are often known to say they get more out of the experience than those who are being helped. A study in Canada concurs that that may be true: Researchers say that high school students who volunteered improved their own health. The researchers recruited and assessed 106 10 th graders from western Canada. Half were assigned to volunteer weekly with elementary school children for two months. At the end of that time, the high school students showed significantly lower markers for cardiovascular disease risk, including body mass index and cholesterol levels when compared with students in a control group.

One key to launching a successful business is finding the right problem to solve. That's why so many entrepreneurs are inspired by problems they encounter themselves or that stymie their family and friends. The trick is not confusing an anecdote for a trend. For example, consider Ramin Bastani, founder and chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based Qpid.me . The company's website is designed to help people deal with one of life's great mysteries: namely, is it safe to have sex with someone I just met in a bar?

Researchers have some new advice for high school students who want to improve their grades: Become friends with academically oriented classmates. It may sound obvious, but researchers went to considerable effort to prove it. They surveyed all members of the junior class at Maine-Endwell High School in Endwell, N.Y., and asked students to rate each of their classmates as either a “best friend,” a “friend,” an “acquaintance” or someone they didn't know. They got responses from 92% of students and used them to reconstruct the social networks among 158 11th-graders as of Jan. 11, 2011.

Beware of education miracles. Too often, there's less there than meets the eye. Remember the extraordinary gains in test scores and lowered dropout rates in Houston schools more than a decade ago? They became the model for the federal No Child Left Behind Act and catapulted the schools' superintendent, Rod Paige, to his position as U.S. secretary of Education at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration. Only years later was it discovered that schools were recording students as having "transferred" when they had in fact dropped out, and that students who were expected to do badly on standardized tests were often kept from taking them.

A triumphal march blared and the crowd roared Saturday afternoon as hundreds of competitors filed into the massive gymnasium at the Roybal Learning Center. The high school students were pumped - some teams danced a little to get warmed up, and at least one team had their school mascot there to root them on - and they were prepared, having spent months training for this moment. Some of the students carried themselves with the intensity of gladiators stepping into the ring. The challenge before them was a purely intellectual one, but it was still daunting: The last leg of Los Angeles Unified's regional Academic Decathlon was about to begin.

Head bowed, eyes puffy, 15-year-old Charles Andrew Williams was formally charged with murder and attempted murder Wednesday, hours after shaken students began returning to the suburban high school that he allegedly turned into a bloody shooting gallery two days before. Dozens of Santana High School students appeared at the San Diego County Superior Court in El Cajon for Williams' arraignment.

Aurora Ponce is senior class president, boasts a near-perfect A average and is UC-bound with plans to study engineering. But according to the 18-year-old and her supporters, officials at the Accelerated School, a collection of South Los Angeles charter schools, have barred Ponce from making her valedictory speech at Saturday's graduation as punishment for participating in a student sit-in to protest increased class sizes and the elimination of college prep classes.

The aviation mechanics school in a hangar at Van Nuys Airport does something that education reformers and the business community say they want from schools: It trains young people for careers - in this case for skilled, well-paid jobs. Though it's officially part of the adult education program of the Los Angeles Unified School District, a small number of high school students also attend after their regular school day for elective credit, a leg up on a career and an inside look at an interesting occupation that keeps them motivated to complete their studies.

There's something uniquely Americana about high school students showing up at a basketball game to scream, yell and act a little silly rooting for their team to win. They call themselves The Cage, The Castle, The Bird Cage, The Pack, The Dome, The Green Hole … It takes energy, organization and desire to create an electric atmosphere in a gymnasium, and I spent all this past week witnessing the drama and excitement attending a series of...